Trail of the Twisted Cros Read online

  “That’s what I was tellin my friend Bob,” one of the guards said. “Hell, I believe all that stuff you say, ‘specially what you said the day you come in here.

  “It’s just,” the guard said, “it’s just that… well, you know, the uniforms and all.”

  “Scares some folks off, don’t it?” Rogers asked the men. “Folks who aren’t like you and don’t take the time to listen to the message and analyze it and see how it makes sense to their lives. Am I right?”

  Long ago, Rogers had learned the insurance salesman’s trick of always asking a question to which the answer must be affirmative. Puts the customer—or the mark—in a positive frame of mind; you make your sale nearly every time.

  “Yeah.”

  The guards spoke as one.

  “Well, let me tell you a little secret, boys. Just between you boys and me, right?” Rogers asked.

  The guards nodded as one.

  “One of these fine days, when my lawyers get me out of this here slammer, there ain’t going to be any more uniforms. I’m going to get my message across to everybody, and nobody’s going to be afraid to stand up for Johnny Lee Rogers, anywhere, anytime, anyhow. You hear me?”

  The guards nodded.

  “Yes, sir! You’ll just see!”

  “Well,” said the guard who had initiated the conversation with the prisoner, “I hope you’ll be able to pull that’n off, Johnny. I really do. And me and the rest of us, well, we’ll be with you.”

  Johnny Lee Rogers put on a humble expression and moved his marks.

  “That’s a burden I’ll be proud to carry. Hell, it’s no burden at all. I’m happy to carry your trust in me. I won’t let you down, men…” He hesitated now, choking, brushing something from his eye.

  “Men,” he continued, stronger now, back in manly control, “are you with me?”

  The guards nodded.

  All the men sat silent for a few seconds. Then someone realized that the room they occupied was inside a Federal penitentiary, and Johnny Lee Rogers was a prisoner being held in this holding area until extra security forces could comb the penitentiary corridors he would have to walk through to get to the seclusion area to which he was being transferred.

  Someone in Washington had ordered that Rogers be barred from mingling with other prisoners, that he be restricted from visitors, and that he take his meals alone, only after precautionary testing. The testing was to detect weapons smuggling.

  A telephone rang. A guard answered it, grunted something into the receiver, and announced that it was “time to go.”

  “Jumpin’ Jesus, sounds like you boys are fixed to fricassee me!” Rogers quipped. “And I ain’t even circumcised.”

  Again, the guards appreciated the levity. There were far too few jokes around the penitentiary, Rogers had told them.

  The guards escorted Rogers down the long, dimly lit corridor leading from general cell blocks to the seclusion section. He was deposited in a room that looked amazingly like a Holiday Inn single, including the picture of a ship at sea bolted to the wall.

  The guards apologized for having to put Rogers into “deep freeze,” as they called it.

  “That’s all right,” Rogers assured them. “You’re just following orders.”

  Ten minutes later, his evening meal was delivered. When he had finished, he put his finger to the bottom of the metal plate and slid off a piece of paper stuck to the underside.

  A guard standing by took the plate as Rogers palmed the small bit of paper. When the guard’s back was turned, Rogers quickly stole a glance at the paper. The note was brief:

  “J: It’s on.”

  He folded up the paper and deposited it in his mouth, between his cheek and gum. Later, when the guard no longer watched through the night, he would chew it up.

  FAIRMONT, West Virginia

  Outside the city about eight miles, the man had said.

  “That’ll be Colin’s place, the one that looks the dirtiest and low-downest and scrubbiest, ‘cause Colin don’t want to do no more work than absolutely necessary to feed that tribe of his, and maybe attract some coons to shoot and a crop of willow trees to hide his still behind.”

  Slayton followed the directions of the filling station operator, right down to the final turn at the big rock, and came across a spot that met the dismal condition advertised.

  A palpable hostility hung over the place, beginning with the heavily bolted gate entrance to the farmhouse, the snarling dogs penned up in the heat, barking insanely at his approach, and ending with the drawn curtains and a red sign on the door proclaiming “No Soliciters.” Slayton wondered if anyone in his right mind would try to sell something here besides material for Ku Klux Klan robes.

  The hostility suddenly became downright tangible, in the form of crackling rifle fire aimed at Ben Slayton.

  Slayton dropped to the ground, instinctively, at the first sound of gunfire. He rolled quickly into a ball, flailing himself toward a wide gum tree for cover.

  On the way, Slayton saw the gunman. An old man around the corner of the house, firing what appeared to be a 30-odd-six rifle toward Slayton with fairly frightening accuracy. A slug ripped through the sleeve of his jacket. Another slug hit the ground just below his belly before he won his cover.

  Slayton pulled his side arm from his belt, a .45-caliber long-nose eight-shot revolver he had selected for calling on the home of Colin Hays. He poked his head around one end of the gum tree, then recoiled when his appearance was met by a retaliatory blast.

  But the gunman was too confident. Slayton saw him leave the house just before he pulled his head back out of the range of fire, saw the man begin running toward him.

  Slayton now readied the revolver, poked his head around the other end of the tree, and opened fire at the charging man.

  He got off four rounds, two of which found their mark in one of the gunman’s legs. The man’s rifle flew out of his hands, almost within Slayton’s reach. He fell to the ground, writhing in pain, and coloring the gray West Virginia silt with bright red.

  Slayton peered tentatively around the tree. All was quiet. But too quiet. And yet he couldn’t very well stay behind that gum tree all day.

  He stood up and walked toward the man he had felled. When he got to him, he leaned over, pretending that all his attention was on the fallen man. But from the corner of his eye, he saw the rifle barrel rising above the sill of a front window.

  He couldn’t swear to it, but he thought it was a woman holding the rifle. But that hardly mattered now, for once again Slayton was a target at Colin Hays’ spread.

  Instead of running toward the gum tree, which would have been expected by his assailant, Slayton rushed the house itself, fanning the trigger latch of his revolver, ducking and weaving inside the shots.

  Glass shattered, and he heard a woman scream. The shots stopped.

  Slayton quickly reloaded. It was time to enter Colin Hays’ parlor.

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  TREALAW, South Wales, United Kingdom,

  10 September.

  The finest lodgings to be had in the Rhondda Valley village of Trealaw are the second-floor rooms of a pub called the Colliers Arms. Conveniently enough, it is also the only place a wayfarer can find lodgings.

  For the townsfolk, the Colliers Arms is the center of village commerce—most of it legal—after dark, and it is the center of village gossip, most of which the place creates each night before the next day’s news events unfold.

  Presiding over it all are the unlikely combination of Jack and Mavis Warry. Jack, the slow-moving, cheerful sort with drooping eyelids, has the blessing of an unexpected quick wit, often called to battle in dealings with his wife. Mavis Warry is a hyperkinetic, tart-tongued woman who, despite her sometimes bristling manner, is like most other women, desirous of the safe harbor of a strong, passionate man.

  Her husband comes close to filling the bill, as close as Mavis will allow any man to come to her own ideal. Unlike mos
t other men, Jack is not afraid of her. When she harangues him, he will often turn to a customer at his bar and explain:

  “If Mavis had been born two centuries earlier, which I’m not entirely convinced she wasn’t, mind you, she would have been either Queen of bloody England or burned at the stake. One or the other. You see no middle ground with the lady.”

  At which time Mavis, called “Queen of Ynyscynon Road” behind her back, will box his ears and encourage their dog Scamp, a canine who resembles one of the gray sheep roaming the grassy hillsides rising up from Ynyscynon Road and the village on both sides, to bite two of the four hands that feed him.

  Years ago, when the coal mines of the Rhondda Valley were at full blast, the Colliers Arms did a brisk business, serving up pint after pint of Whit-bread lager, gallons of Dewars Scotch, and a host of cocktails named after flowers for the wives of the colliery workers, who believed that drinks of the lower order were strictly the provenance of the menfolk. Today, however, with all of Britain ready to take its place in the Third World—or so quipped Charles, the Prince of Wales, not so long ago—the Colliers Arms .is economically depressed.

  The man who used to drop by three nights a week now comes two nights, sometimes only one. The man who used to drop three quid a visit now sips more slowly, hoping to keep it under two. And at seventy pence the packet, more and more patrons are foregoing the cigarette machines of the Colliers and rolling their own “fags.”

  Nonetheless, Mavis Warry nightly makes her entrance from her quarters above the bar, flowing down the stairs in something colorful, something that flies in the face of British decline and torpor. Her country may be on the skids, but Mavis Warry behaves as if the old Empire was at its most robust, as if she and Britain had perfect justification to throw their respective charms and weights around wherever they jolly well pleased.

  Without her, Jack Warry would suffer a life of drawing up Whitbreads by the pint and hearing the same old weary tale of Tory or Labor perfidy, depending on who was buying the Whitbread at any given moment. With her, Jack lived the merry life of foil for most of his waking moments, and comedian when he chose to counter Mavis.

  The Warrys were fortunate to be publicans. They were the best show in town and, consequently, theirs was the pub that would muddle through the current ills of Britain if none around them could hold their own.

  Each evening at closing time, which in all of Britain is 11 p.m., the Warrys hold court to a small group of village regulars, a select number of whom are usually invited upstairs for a late supper and an accounting of the evening’s gossip.

  Tonight, Mavis bustled around upstairs with pots filled with curried lamb and chips. She was assisted by a local maid named Lynfa, who was quite hopeful of attracting the favors of a man named Leo Thatcher.

  Mavis was not hesitant in voicing her disapproval.

  “The man comes into town without a copper to his name and he’s got a job at the only colliery in operation, way over to St. John’s, and he sits up here in his room day after day between times he’s called to work, all by himself,” she said.

  Lynfa said nothing in response. She had learned about getting along with Mavis. It was quite simple, really. One just listened to her opinions, which were delivered on everything, and then did exactly what one wished to do, regardless of anything Mavis said. Somehow, Mavis didn’t notice, and everyone seemed happy with the result.

  “I suppose you’ll be with him… tonight?” Mavis asked.

  Lynfa colored and flashed dark brown eyes at her friend.

  The subject was dropped as Jack entered the room where the women were preparing the meal.

  “I would like your view on something,” Mavis said to her husband.

  Jack Warry feigned a stroke.

  “When you’re through with the bloody theatrics, you might let me know what you think of this Thatcher bloke. Queer duck, don’t you think?” Mavis asked.

  Lynfa bustled about the kitchen, oblivious to this discussion.

  “I think I like a bloke what pays his bills, and if that’s all he wants to do around this place, it’s a fine thing with me,” Jack said.

  “He’s too quiet,” Mavis said. Her voice rose. “He doesn’t fit in here. It’s spooky, the way he sits in that room, writing and reading and whatever in the name of all that’s evil he does with himself in there.”

  “What are you complaining about, flower?” Jack asked her, placing his arm around her shoulders, hoping to hush her a bit, as he heard Leo Thatcher and the other guests climbing the stairway. “He rents a room from us regular, and he pays the rent regular, and we could use a half-dozen more like him to keep the place going.”

  “He comes and goes. I don’t mean just from this place, or even from the Valley. I mean, I hear he comes and goes all over the blinkin’ planet and him being just a coal miner from Wales…”

  She wasn’t able to finish her thoughts. Leo Thatcher was among the first of the small group who entered the room.

  Meanwhile, there was the supper to serve up. Lynfa was busy at it already, making certain that Leo Thatcher received the lion’s share.

  FAIRMONT, West Virginia

  “We was afraid you was another one of Johnny Lee Rogers’ goons,” Mrs. Hays explained, “and so that’s why my brother and me opened fire on you. They been comin left and right for a week now, mean-lookin cusses every one of them, even if they was dressed up nice and all.”

  Slayton had difficulty taking comfort in the explanation for his nearly being shot. He busied himself removing Mrs. Hays’ laundry from the line. It had taken two days of ingratiating himself with her before she would open up to him, before she would provide the link between Johnny Lee Rogers and her husband, who had been missing now since the mine explosion.

  So far, Slayton had learned that Colin Hays, like many of the ill-educated, underskilled men in this part of the country, demonstrated their importance by robbing others of theirs. At first, Hays was a member of the local Klan chapter, elevating himself to “Klavern Kleagle.”

  Then came his intellectual days, when he was enamored of the John Birch Society. But somehow, following the writings of a retired candy manufacturer was not the stuff necessary to fire the life of Colin Hays.

  The American Nazi Party came along, and Colin Hays signed up as a storm trooper. The trouble with that was that some newspaper and television people from Wheeling came to a public rally once and photographed them all goose-stepping around town, and Hays and the rest became laughingstocks.

  But the day that Johnny Lee Rogers came to town changed all that. Colin Hays and the others wore their Nazi uniforms proudly that day, in blind devotion to the charismatic young man who made the county fair crowd laugh and applaud and shake their fists.

  It wasn’t so much in what the big news magazines said about Rogers. No one in Fairmont cared that he dressed as if he’d just walked off a page in Esquire magazine. And it wasn’t so much that he voiced their fears and bigotries. They had had experience with populist demagogues before. The thing about Johnny Lee Rogers was that he was of the people, or so it seemed, and there he was, up there in the fancy clothes with the big car and the big smile and the television cameras following him wherever he went. Better than half the time, Rogers’ audience wasn’t listening to his words. They were merely basking in his glow, the glow of a young fellow from the same hard-scrabble part of the world as they were, and who nonetheless was celebrated. His name was spelled correctly in all the newspapers of the land. His followers saw the name, and ignored much of the rest.

  Rogers knew it. He knew he had his constituency excited, that they would do whatever he said. He knew, too, that the media hadn’t grasped this control he possessed. They kept calling him a “neo-Nazi” and a “convicted killer,” and still his supporters screamed for his release.

  Rogers knew, too, that Colin Hays loved him like a god.

  Which was why, Slayton was learning from Mrs. Hays, Rogers’ men worked on him, spent so many nights here at t
his dirt farm talking him into something he dreaded doing.

  “Dreaded?” Slayton asked, curious about her choice of words.

  “I’d sure say so,” she said. “Never seen my husband toss and turn so goddam much in all the years I known him. Tossin and turnin all night, and mumblin stuff about service to the Fatherland or somethin… . Stuff somebody else must have said to him, ‘cause he never would dream those words up on his own.”

  “And you don’t have any idea what that ‘service’ was he was asked to perform?”

  “Well, what do you reckon I think it was? You think just ‘cause I’m a hillbilly that I’m dumb as a box of rocks? ‘Course it’s got somethin to do with what happened down at the mine.”

  “He told you?”

  Mrs. Hays stamped her foot.

  “You don’t sound entirely like some ignorant Yankee to me, boy. Where you from?”

  “Virginia, by way of Michigan.”

  “So, I should think you’d know enough to listen to a body, even if they didn’t go to goddam Harvard or someplace like that. Now, I told you, boy, I don’t know what the goddam Sam Hill my Colin done… I just know, like everybody else in this goddam town does now, that he’s been gone two days in disappearance, and the mine blew and Colin was some sort of Nazi lover or somethin, and the papers is full of stories about how Colin blew up the mine for Johnny Lee Rogers—and that’s why my brother and me has got to shoot folks off the place. We been gettin some mighty weird callers, you know.

  “The thing of it is, my Colin isn’t any more able to plant a bomb than he is a potato bud. Look around this place; you see any evidence of a crafty man livin here?”

  She took a breath, then continued.

  “I tell you what, I think Colin was used by these goons in the suits. I think they wanted somebody to blame all this on, and they picked Colin because he’s about as big and dumb as a man comes.